Guy Renton Page 20

  The weeks went by; Margery went for a fortnight to St. Jean de Luz. She left in such high spirits and returned looking so well that he presumed that she had not gone unaccompanied. Cheerful letters arrived from Franklin. His immediate chiefs reported that he was making himself popular and throwing himself into his new duties with enthusiasm. Rex was taking the political situation seriously but hopefully. A crisis was imminent in his opinion. “The best thing for the country too: call people to their senses. Shouldn’t be surprised if we didn’t have a National government. Close the ranks: everyone pulling together, as we did during the war. Don’t think I’m a militarist, my dear Guy: far from it, I hate war: any real soldier must, but my word there’s no substitute for helping a nation find its health and spirit. Wish there was but I’m afraid there isn’t. That’s what fellows like myself are waiting for, a chance to prove ourselves, to serve again.”

  Guy asked if his Intelligence training cadre was progressing well.

  “Yes and no. We’re getting some of the right fellows in, but some who are not quite so right. It’ll need weeding out. Too many people are joining us for the wrong reasons; not because they want to dedicate themselves to their country’s service, but because they’ve a grudge against the régime. Too many malcontents; men who feel the country owes them something; not that they owe something to their country; men who think that in a differently constituted society they’d stand a better chance. That isn’t the type of man we want.”

  “What type of man do you want?”

  “I’ve told you. Men like you; men with a real stake in the country: practical, efficient men, who would make a success of their lives whatever government was in power, who have what the Americans call ‘know-how’. There are a great many men of that type in the country. It’s they who’ve made it great. Trouble is that that type of person only feels that it’s up to him to do anything for the country at a time of crisis.”

  To Guy’s way of thinking that was the very thing that was so right about Britain in general, and London in particular; that it was full of practical, informed men of affairs who were content to mind their own business and leave the running of the country to the professional administrators, the politicians, and the civil servants; but perhaps in thinking that he was only finding an excuse for his own laziness. So much of what Rex said made sense: yet when he did make sense, it was always, Guy suspected, for the wrong reasons. There was something basically out of focus in his whole point of view. He had more than a little kinship with the malcontents who had a grudge against society. Wasn’t Rex’s trouble that he was a person who had been trained to command, and now found himself without anything or anyone to organize?

  With his nephews at boarding school, Guy found himself seeing rather more of Rex than he had in recent years. At the beginning and the end of term he was requisitioned to meet the boys at one station, and guide them across London to another. Usually this involved the provision of some meal and some -excursion: a matinée, a cinema, an hour or so at Lord’s. In return Rex felt himself obliged to make some return whenever he and Lucy were in London. Children were their main common interest and Rex would read out the last report, display the latest letters. Guy found himself occupying a new position in the family, not so much as its head but as its uncle. He gave, he supposed, an air of stability to the others. His flat wasn’t a perch: it was a base. He had moreover a settled feeling about himself: he wasn’t restless, he wasn’t on the look-out for change: he suggested composure to other people.

  “I like coming to your flat,” Margery once said. “It’s warm and cosy and the way one left it.”

  For her the flat was now more than a port of call on her way back from work; it was a harbour where she could put in to replenish and restore; both when she was elated and when she was depressed. She never confided in him what her problems were; she talked impersonally; with a frequent use of the word ‘one’. “One finds nowadays. . . .” It was a period when the modern girl was news; articles about her, usually by women novelists, were constantly splashed across double columns in the evening papers; these articles served as a framework on which Margery would hang her views and observations and Guy could guess from them as to how she was feeling about this and that, what was worrying and what was pleasing her. One factor remained constant. The Advertising Agency was flourishing.

  “You’re not the modern girl any longer,” he informed her. “You’re the career woman, exhibit A, model nineteen-thirty.”

  “I might be something worse.”

  “You might be a whole lot worse.”

  Barbara too had fallen into the habit of dropping in upon him in the evenings, before or after dinner. She was now at London University, reading history, with an established right to an un-chaperoned existence. She had her cheque book and her latchkey, kept her own hours and chose her friends.

  “I wish I had some idea of the company my youngest daughter keeps,” her father would occasionally remark. “I’ve suggested that she should bring some of them out to lunch on Sunday, but I always get the same reply—‘As soon as I make friends with someone whom I think you’d like.’ I must say I’d like to have some idea as to who they are.”

  “You needn’t worry, Father. I’ve seen some of them; they’re quite all right.”

  She would often bring round a section of what she called ‘the gang’. Young and fresh and enthusiastic, they did not seem to fit into any special category. At Oxford in his day there had been a division between those who had been old enough to serve in the war and those who had not; in Franklin’s day there had been a division between the aesthetes and the hearties. There was no such division among Barbara’s friends: they were young and healthy: playing hard, working hard: some of them were athletic and some were not; what they seemed chiefly to have in common was a zest for living. They had, however, none of the feverish gaiety that he had noticed in the previous summer among the ‘bright young people’, when ‘the showboat’ had been anchored below Charing Cross as the stage for a succession of wild parties that had derived half their kick from the fact that normal life was within sight of them: taxis hurrying by on the Embankment, trams dipping and swaying over Westminster Bridge, the river traffic slowly chunking past.

  Nor was there any of the heavy drinking among Barbara’s friends that he had noticed in Franklin’s group. Half of the men drank beer. They would sit with tankards in their hands, puffing at their pipes, arguing away into the night. They did not think getting drunk was smart: they were also, it seemed to him, more natural about sex. Immediately after the war everyone had talked about Freud, psychoanalysis, and repressions; girls had felt the loss of inexperience was a necessary prelude to physical and mental health. A little later, under the banner of Myra Viveash and Iris Storm, the bright young ladies had considered that they owed it to their new won independence to be as casual as their brothers. Barbara’s friends took in their stride what the press called ‘that side of life’. They accepted it as each individual’s personal and private problem. Which probably meant that The Green Hat was the final assault of the battle that had been opened by Ann Veronica. The ramparts had fallen; a new flag flew above the fortress.

  He enjoyed the visits of Barbara’s friends with their exuberance and their enthusiasm, their readiness to argue, the way they would shout at one another, but never quarrel: the genuine liking they all seemed to have for one another. They were like a fresh wind blowing through his life. They rejuvenated him. Yet at the same time they made him feel middle-aged. They appealed to him in their arguments as though he were some antediluvian referee. “How did it happen when you were young?” “Was it like that in your day?” In the same way that he had asked his father, when he was a schoolboy, how things had been at Fernhurst.

  Several of Barbara’s friends were Rugby footballers; but none of them, apparently, had seen him play. “Barbara tells me that you were an International, that you played for the Harlequins. I suppose you played with Adrian Stoop.”

 
Adrian Stoop was one of those legendary figures of whom every schoolboy had read; Adrian Stoop in the years before the war, when he himself was a fag at Fernhurst, had as fly-half revolutionized three-quarter play. He was part of the history of the game. But Stoop had touched his last football in 1914. It was strange to find himself regarded as a contemporary of Adrian’s. ‘Hell,’ he thought, ‘I only retired in 1925: I played for England in 1923.’

  How quickly he had been relegated to the past, to the limbo of ex-Internationals. How fugitive was the fame of a footballer. There were no scores, no records: no equivalent of Wisden; nothing that the young enthusiast could pore over on summer evenings; as fugitive as an actor’s life. What made more lifeless reading than old programmes? Even so, to have been forgotten quite so quickly! It was no doubt a very salutary experience, to realize that though to the men of his own age group he was still the dashing artificer of England’s triumphs, to his sister’s contemporaries he was a genial back-number. He looked at himself in the glass: he seemed much the same. His hair was no thinner, wasn’t even beginning to grow grey. His waistcoats were no tighter.

  Once or twice Barbara brought round Pamela.

  She had abandoned her Eton crop in favour of a fringe with the hair worn long over her ears, cut straight like a medieval cap along her neck; the kind of cut that had been fashionable in the early ‘twenties. “I can’t get a hat to fit me, so I don’t wear a hat,” she said. It made her look Bohemian, but it suited her. Skirts now were ankle-length; they made her look grown-up.

  Franklin, she said, was being a good correspondent. His descriptions of the life there and the people that he was meeting made her roar with laughter. No, she had no complaints about him. “Except that he seems too cheerful. I’d like him a bit more woebegone.”

  Guy asked Barbara how much Pamela was missing Franklin.

  “She was like a wraith for the first fortnight, but I fancy she’s getting over it. She’s still in love with him. But she’s beginning to enjoy things. I should say she was fair game for the first reasonable male who came along. She was all worked up and then left in the air. I think Franklin should be warned. Couldn’t you find some excuse for going out there?”

  “I suppose I could.”

  The 1930 vintage was not apparently going to amount to much. There was no question of shipping it as a vintage year. But there was always an excuse for going out to Portugal and he always welcomed an opportunity of taking it. He loved the atmosphere of the vintage in mid-September—the same men and women gathering year after year, coming in by foot, many of them from quite distant villages; the pickers carrying on the napes of their necks, with a strong support across the forehead, baskets with a tin container; the foremen removing bad leaves and grapes, not even allowing the men to sit upon their haunches; the grapes taken to the Lagares by ox-cart; the oxen wearing a curious harness attached to a central shaft that enabled them to pull the cart by pressure of their foreheads; the men, a short stocky breed of man, lined up on either side of the trough, the grapes reaching their thighs, marking time slowly to the centre, one of them shouting out the tune; working in four-hour shifts, sustained by issues of cigarettes and tots of brandy; in the evening the women dancing, to accordion and drum. Guy loved the whole feel of it.

  He loved Oporto too; a city at the same time so foreign and so familiar; so primitive with its steep narrow streets, its roads pocked with pot-holes; its ox-teams with their long, fantastic, brightly coloured yokes, standing upright like pictures upon easels, carved with intricate, pierced patterns; the boat-shaped baskets that the natives carried on their heads; the odd local craft that plied the Douro, furnished with a vast single sail and steered from the back by a rudder manipulated by oarsmen perched on a high platform; the pungent all pervading odour of dried cod. Yes, he could fix a visit.

  “It’s everything that a foreign city should be,” Franklin was saying to him two weeks later. “You really feel abroad, there are so few tourists, the resident English aren’t too English; everyone knows everyone. Or at least in the small world that I move in, they do.”

  He was living as pensionnaire with a Portuguese family, and it was obvious that he had made himself a very special guest. It was a typical Portuguese town house; a bare stone wall with a heavy studded door and narrow barred windows facing on the street: inside was a high courtyard, open to the sky with a fountain playing and a succession of doors opening off.

  Franklin took Guy round there after the office closed. They sat in a circle on the paved terrace-way that ran under a roofed veranda. They were served with a white port and sugared biscuits. The hostess was very plump, dark-haired, with full, very red, moist lips and very bright dark eyes: the skin of her neck was very white. She was swathed in voluminous draperies. She had the face of a quite young woman. She was probably not more than thirty-four. She never spoke unless she was addressed. She sat rocking herself slowly in a chair; fanning herself with a single ostrich feather. Every now and then she passed her tongue over her lips: her eyes were fixed all the time on Franklin. She had two children, a son of fifteen and a girl of twelve: they too watched Franklin. He treated all three with equal courtesy; addressing his remarks to them, inviting their opinion, talking to them, never at them, sunning himself in their manifest affection for him.

  Later Franklin took Guy to a café where there was a gipsy band. It was very gay; with the girls wearing embroidered shawls. One of them waved at Franklin. He smiled but shook his head.

  “How different this is from London. Compare this with the Flamingo. It’s all so natural here; nothing’s against the law. There’s a lot to be said for the European system of having two types of girl; the kind one’s sister knows and the other kind. You know where you are here. Look at these girls; they’re having a perfectly good time. They don’t have to pretend to be respectable, like those London dance hostesses.”

  They stayed on till close on two o’clock, then walked slowly back. It was a warm moonlit night.

  “How often can you enjoy a moon in England?” Franklin said. “You find yourself shivering within five minutes.”

  Next day Franklin had a lunch party. “I’m afraid,” he said, “that we won’t be even numbers. That’s one of the problems. One can’t ask half the women one knows to meet the wives and sisters of one’s friends.”

  He had, however, managed to collect an English couple who were in transit.

  “I feel she may be someone grand,” he said. “At any rate, she’s an Honourable, but as he isn’t in Who’s Who, I don’t quite see how we can find out. One can’t ask very well.”

  An Englishman, at least, couldn’t very well. But another of his guests, Pedro Miguelez, a Portuguese wine salesman whose presence at the party enabled Franklin to charge its cost on his expense account, was able to.

  “Me,” he said, “I try hard to understand your English title. I revere the title: as I would the heirs of our own Dear Manuel. I am a good republican but I am a royalist at heart.”

  He was tall, dark, close-shaven with a shining jowl. His hair glistened under the impress of an oleaginous potently-perfumed lotion. He had long slim fingers; the nails were exquisitely manicured: he wore a cameo signet-ring on his left hand and a ring of heavily-engraved silver, studded with small emeralds, on the fourth finger of his right. He moved his hands in constant gesticulation. He wore a light fawn-coloured suit, a silk shirt and a silver and grey bow tie. He was even more obviously male than Jimmy Grant.

  With the English lady from whom he speedily acquired the information that she was, though the wife of a simple commoner Major Jock Urquhart-Smythe, by birth the second daughter of a Wessex Baron shortly to become extinct, he went down, as the saying at that time was, ‘like a dinner.’

  Mrs. Urquhart-Smythe was a tall, long-necked woman; with a prominent nose and a high-toned voice. She was very thin. At a first glance and at a distance, she looked as though she might be wearing a mask. At close range she was intimidating; with a highly-developed capaci
ty to freeze. But under Senhor Miguelez’s badinage, she revealed herself as a person not only of wit and charm, but of quite remarkable good looks. Colour came into her cheeks, her voice dropped a tone, her eyes brightened.

  They were lunching under an awning, in the cool of a sidewalk café; a beaded carafe of rosé wine was emptied and replenished. Senhor Miguelez became more personal. The conversation became a cross-table dialogue between himself and the Englishwoman.

  “It is what I have been always told,” he was remarking, “no one can be more lively than an Englishwoman—when she is out of England.”

  “Oh, we can be lively enough in England, if anyone gives us the chance.”

  The answer came back pat, but with a moment’s pause before the final clause. She looked across the table as she said it. Guy was watching Miguelez; he saw or fancied that he saw a quick look of understanding flicker there, as though an unworded pact had been signed between them. He remembered a remark of Margery’s about foreigners and Englishwomen. He looked at Franklin’s hostess; she had scarcely spoken during the meal: she had been too busy eating, but there was at that moment an amused twinkle in her eye.

  With coffee was served a Spanish brandy, Fundador; the talk got noisier. It was without doubt a most successful party. They had been sitting over the table for a full two hours before Mrs. Urquhart-Smythe rose to take her leave with a “This has been lovely, more than lovely, and you must be sure to look me up when you’re in London. You’ve got my address now, haven’t you? Let me know a few days in advance so that I can arrange something really entertaining for you.”

  She was most insistent.

  “That’s another of the advantages of living in a small place like this,” said Franklin afterwards. “You meet all kinds of people that you’d never meet at home. Heaven knows how many people I haven’t entertained at the firm’s expense. When I get back to England I shall have a dinner invitation every night.”